Sunday, August 31, 2008

Justin Taylor invokes a woman's needle by lifting the verb hedge

Decatur Book Fair is in town, mostly it is kiddie books or something, I went and la-la gagged through the hot fields with some out of town friends from the McSweeney's/Believer camp, we drank several pitchers of margaritas and threw ourselves through rooms together, getting nasty loud, I think I had a baby at some point, I talked to a dude who really said "I mean, being famous, it's the point of everything, it's what we're all aiming at, right?, it is the mark of success," he was dead serious, I scrunched a little and said something meanish, he looked at me, who am I kidding

We ended up at some 'VIP' party in a marble room layered in the city hall of Decatur, booze was free, I licked a coffin, I got confused as to the purposes of those who weren't there drunk on margaritas and tongue-dancing, 'writer' writers are weird, there were lots of nice people, I liked it, I shouted some, Sweetwater beer is the nast, I mean that in the worst way, things continued

There was a cannon made out of chocolate, I slept inside it, someone was mowing the grass on a trinket, where was Billy Collins?

BTW, if you are going to the Decatur Fest today or tomorrow, drop by the Mcsweeney's/Believer booth, they also have issues of No Colony for sale for us, nicely.

No Colony orders will be going out early this week.

Matthew Savoca has a new video on HERE EXPLODES MY GIANT FACE, which has been a fun site so far to watch and enjoy and lick your underbelly quietly in the meadow smear.

I have Deb Olin Unferth's VACATION now in my hand, it is beautiful, I am going to touch it with my eyes

Speaking of which:

I got an extra copy of Justin Taylor's new poetry book MORE PERFECT DEPICTIONS OF NOISE, it is a beautiful handmade object full of Justin's sleek sexed language & words, Justin is negating the negation by running right into the nostrils of what you were trying not to look at, Justin is a captain of megawattage,

What I am saying is, I want to give away my 2nd copy of the book, who will get it?, here is how to get it: before this poetry book, Justin edited an anthology The Apocalypse Reader. Leave a comment telling which book by any of the authors in Apocalypse Reader you like or admire and why. You may be as brief or verbose as needed, 10 to 10,000 words.

Person who I think says something some way, I will send the copy of Justin's book. I'll choose it like later this week, maybe Wednesday, don't think too much, just type it in the comment, go for it, win.

This is the easiest-to-enter contest of all time, considering how that list of contributors is probably the most concisely genius list of workers I have seen compiled in one text. Find something to say about one of them, win a book.

Much as I love love love Terese Svodoba's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent (Go read it, all of you!), I'll have to go with Matthew Derby's Super Flat Times because "The Sound Gun" and "Behavior Pilot" just may have kicked my ass harder than any other 1-2 story combination I've read over the last five years (and there's been some really nice 1-2 combinations in that time).

Deb Olin Unferth writes things I like. Her s/t story is great and so is the youtube video that goes with it. Maybe most of all, I liked a story called "The Bride." I don't have that around to quote, so here's something from "Sickos," another very good story:

"And now N has found her—through a search, admittedly an unheroic one, a search where she did not have to climb mountains or cross seas or go downtown and poke around in a box of unmatched mittens, did not even have to leave her chair, but merely had to think about her friend and press a few buttons, which makes her think it should be called a summoning, not a search. A subpoena, perhaps."

I want Diane Williams to be my aunt. I want her to appear at my house on the more sizeable religious and secular holidays. I want her to kick all our asses at, I don't know, Trivial Pursuit, or possibly a trick-based card game of some sort. I want her to write the extended family Christmas letter.

When I worked at Denver ER Edgar Allan Poe stole our insulin syringes on the way out the door. He left AMA. He ate three trays of smelly hospital food. He wandered into the woods and had to live for three days off a king-size Snickers bar. We all slept with him in closets. We saved him, and him us.

i like jurassic park by jeff goldblum. i saw this movie when i was a kid and i thought jeff goldblum was creepy, weird, and annoying. but when i watched this movie recently i thought that maybe jeff goldblum is a human on levels that cannot be achieved. jeff goldblum is jeff goldblum always and foremost and also he is watching you as you shit. he is there for all functions human. he is also probably a prick in real life.

Poe created the American gothic without being in America. Flannery O'Connor would not be herself without Poe. Neither would Faulkner. He wrote horror stories without monsters--the horror came from people. He drank a lot of absinthe and died in a gutter somewhere in France. He made poem refrains terrifying. He wrote about Freud's uncanny before Freud started doing coke. Henry James wishes he was Edgar Allen Poe.

Plus, I just typed all that after breaking my ring finger in a tetherball match with my brother. That has to count for something.

I hate contests. At least there's no reading fee for this one. Magic for Beginners has its moments. Kelly Link, as a person, is fucking great. She let me teach her how to pour a black and tan. Black and tans--any day, or time of day--far out-rock the Sweetwater. As for Natty Hawthorne: why is YGB always anthologized? It's great and all, but Rappaccini's Daughter and The Birthmark always get ignored. We can pretty much thank Hawthorne for every camp 1950s horror movie ever made. More than Shelley, even, Hawthorne's responsible for Hollywood's version of Frankenstein. Just for that, for the gothic, my friends, Hawthorne is my death metal. Even Poe has to bow to the master of the one-trick side character. Maybe Dickens has him beat . . .

In Milwaukee my roommate was reading UK LeGuin's THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, but I took it from him and read it instead. A man goes to a shrink because he must not sleep because when he sleeps, his dreams change reality. A picture of a horse in the doc's office keeps morphing. It's like a Blake Butler story told by a virgin.